A recent poll breaks down the Republican electorate in the cleanest way. Asked if they believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election legitimately or only due to voter fraud, Nikki Haley has a 56-point margin among those who believe Biden legitimately won. But Trump has a staggering 74-point margin among those who don’t.
Haley’s problem is that only 42 percent of the voters believe Biden won in 2020. Worse, New Hampshire, chock-full of independent and socially moderate Republicans, is one of her better states. Nationally, some two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump genuinely won.
Incumbent presidents who are running for reelection almost always win the nomination. Why? Because they won last time, and parties like nominating winners. Defeated candidates who run for the nomination usually lose. Why? Because they lost last time, and parties hate nominating losers.
If Republicans wanted their party to nominate somebody other than Donald Trump — and most of the party’s elected officials and donors did, at least secretly — then they needed their voters to understand that he lost the 2020 election. But doing so required hard steps they were never willing to take.
The outbreak of conscientiousness that swept through the Republican Party after January 6, 2021 gave way like a fever. One week after the insurrection, Axios reported that Republicans were “divided whether to do it with one quick kill via impeachment, or let him slowly fade away.” The framing of the question answered itself: Why take on the risk of fighting Trump and alienating his supporters when he would simply go away on his own?
Soon after, they decided the handful of Republicans who continued to oppose him were making themselves a bother, and either stood by or actively joined in efforts to remove them from their posts. National Review, the headquarters of anti-anti-Trump Republicanism, wrote exactly two months after the insurrection, “so long as the House Republican caucus is unwilling or unable to break with Trump, and so long as Trump and his most-devoted supporters demand that they not change their mind and not change the subject, the caucus’s leadership may as well reflect that.”
The party was divided over Trump’s election lies and coup attempt, but the divide had an asymmetric quality. One faction was obsessed with litigating its beliefs and repeating them endlessly, while the opposing faction only wanted the issue to go away. The outcome of this one-sided argument was inevitable. The percentage of Republicans who believed Trump has steadily risen.
The response by the anti-anti-Trump right has been to blame this state of affairs on Democrats. If their party remains loyal to Trump, it must be the hidden hand of the left at work. “The Trump campaign, the press, and the Biden Democrats say the race is over. Mr. Biden wants Mr. Trump as the nominee because he believes Mr. Trump is the easiest to beat,” sniffs the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The leading theory on the anti-anti-Trump right holds that a series of prosecutors have brought charges against Trump in order to help him win the nomination. “The point of the lawfare siege, which is the target of Trump’s constant ire and is thus scoffed at by his fans as ineffective partisanship, was to get Trump nominated. In that sense, the siege has been effective beyond the Democrats’ wildest dreams,” writes National Review’s Andrew McCarthy. His colleague Dan McLaughlin adds, “the biggest factor in this primary has been the indictments, which produced an immediate & enduring poll shift towards Trump. Democrats got what they wanted.”
There are two ironies about this conviction that Democrats prosecuted Trump in order to prop him up. The first is that criminal prosecution was originally proposed by Republicans as an alternative to impeachment. “We have a criminal-justice system in this country. We have civil litigation,” suggested Mitch McConnell in early 2021. The possibility of legal accountability for Trump was first an excuse for Republicans not to impeach, and now it is an excuse for why they decided to nominate him.
Second, if the Justice Department had declined to prosecute the former president, anti-anti-Trumpers would have an even better case. Just imagine the Justice Department concluded that, despite the criminal referrals brought to them by the J6 Committee, they found no legal case in Trump’s coup attempt.
And then imagine that, even after Trump illegally kept highly classified documents, storing them in bathrooms and ballroom stages in an unsecured social club that’s a spy magnet, and then brazenly lied and obstructed justice when asked to return the documents, the Justice Department let him get away with it. What would anti-anti-Trumpers have said about that? They’d have said Biden’s prosecutors decided not to lock up Trump because they want to run against him.
All these mental contortions on the right are an attempt to foist responsibility for Trump’s hold on the Republican Party to external forces. The unavoidable reality is that if Republicans wanted a different nominee, they needed to convince their base the last nominee actually lost. Doing that would have created a fissure within the coalition and caused short-term political pain. So they stumbled on, hoping to paper over the division and keep the coalition intact at all costs. And here we are. They won’t even begin the process of changing anything until they admit they did this to themselves.
